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With TheBrain iOS you can send web pages to the inbox to attach them to thoughts using a bookmarklet. This is fine inside of a browser, but what about from other apps?

The URL Scheme TheBrain iOS uses is

Code:

brain://app/api/inbox?url=[URL]&title=[Title]

One of the more popular "automation" applications for iOS is Drafts (hint, if you are using iOS you should be using Drafts), and a lot of applications support sending information there. You can create a URL Custom Action as follows:

Code:

brain://app/api/inbox?url=[[body]]&title=[[title]]

This will use the first line of a note as the Title of the URL you are sending, and the rest as the URL.

I've also done something similar in Mr Reader (an RSS Reader). You can use the following code to create a custom App services to send the Title and the URL to TheBrain:

Code:

brain://app/api/inbox?url={[URL]}&title={[TITLE]}

You could probably create the same sort of thing in LaunchCenter Pro.

Hopefully TheBrain will beef up the URL automation for iOS in future releases (allowing us to create a new thought from scratch and pass the thought name and notes as well, and including x-callback-url support) but this is a promising start.

Thank you for the Mr.Reader -> Brain import. That's simply wonderful!This allows me to rapidly import information to specific thoughts (that I obviously chose first). This rapid filing is important as I have discovered that importing everything into a general thought and having to file thoughts at a later time leads to a lot of unfiled documents...For the first time I now have a rapid filing method at hand. Now it would just be wonderful if I could create a thought directly from the brain-inbox without having to create a specific thought first.

Hi. Can you shed a bit more light on these URL schemes for the Brain please. The Bookmarklet works fine but neither the drafts code that you supply or the Mr Reader one seems to work. With Drafts I just get an error and with Me Reeder it says app not installed.

Thanks zenrain works perfectly now. For Mr Reader I'd made a stupid typo. For drafts (and perhaps this is caused by reading your post on my ipad) your code snipet earlier in the post was different to the one you've provided now.

Presumably the drafts action could be modified to use a url that I had previously copied? I need to swot up on url schemes in drafts again. I suspect my most likely workflow would be see a url somewhere - email, Facebook etc, copy it go to drafts add a thought title and send to Brain.

I'm so pleased TheBrain is at last available on the iPad. Early days but I can see it replacing Evernote for me. Improvements that I can immediately think of -

1. Need to be able to "open in" from other apps.
2. Ability to copy a link to a thought into another app (a notes type app most likely)
3. On the web interface you could create a new thought by dragging from a thought with your finger - this is a much more intuitive way to add thoughts and needs adding to the app.
4. (Very important) - Need to be able to designate thoughts (with attachments) to be accessible offline. Evernote does this very well.

I've been using URL schemes in LifeTopix, primarily for launching from one location, but the URLs aren't that easy to find, and many apps don't seem to support them. Here's one listing I've found: http://handleopenurl.com/ .

Thanks Zenrain, and thanks to TB Team for iOS Brain and all these new opportunities!

Pat

iOS 8 is out and we don't have a Share extension yet for TheBrain.However...If you own Workflow you have the next best thing.

I'm attaching a workflow action extension (sorry, I had to zip it as the forum doesn't allow me to upload the .wflow file). If you have Workflow installed on iOS, open the unzipped workflow action extension and it will add it to your workflows.

To enable Workflow Action extensions:Go into Safari, and click the Share button on a website. In the bottom list of actions, scroll to the right and click More and then activate the Run Workflow activity (and I dragged it to the top of the list).

Now, for the good stuff.When you are on a page you want to save to TheBrain iOS, click the Share Button and then Run Workflow. Choose To TheBrain.

It will open Workflow, then give you a prompt to set the Thought Name and pre-fill with the title of the web page (I added this step because I often want to remove part of the URL title or modify it somehow for the name of the Thought). You can leave as is if you want.It will then open TheBrain app and add the page to the Inbox as normal.

Here's the reason I did this. Create a new thought, and in the thought name, Paste. It will paste the title you modified (or kept as is). Then add the attachment and choose the URL from the inbox.

Note: I kept the normal web page title as the Title that is passed to TheBrain rather than the title modified to use as the thought name.

And there you have it. The quickest way we have to get a page into TheBrain and use the page title as the thought name.

I've updated the workflow, which is mostly good. The original workflow would grab the page title if you accessed it from Safari. However, if you used it in another app (for example, Reeder, or Tweetbot) it would return "Action Extension" as the name. Annoying.

I've updated the workflow to resolve this, however because it has to grab page contents to resolve the issue, it uses more memory (which sometimes causes it to fail if it gets low, if this is the case just re-run it), or just plain won't work on a few pages. I don't know why.If you want, keep the original for when you use Safari, and the updated one for use in other apps.

As a side note, now that I have this workflow my use of TheBrain on iOS has increased a LOT. Since one of my main use cases on iOS is adding interesting links to things I'm reading, it's taken the majority of the pain out of adding thoughts. I highly recommend Workflow, not just for this, but you can use it for automation for other apps also.

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